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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2016
When discussing the preconditions of liberal Islamic politics, liberal theorists often advocate the reinterpretation of traditional religious texts in light of liberal political theory. Such an interpretive project is worth comparing to a similar project conceived by the medieval Islamic philosopher Alfarabi, whose effort to introduce Greek political philosophy into his political-religious community parallels these efforts to introduce liberal theory into Islamic communities. Alfarabi argued that traditional texts should be reinterpreted in light of a new political science, one based on Greek sources but adapted to the unique needs of a community like his. This article shows how Alfarabi conceived of these adaptations, emphasizing the flexibility that he thought students of Greek political philosophy should adopt in accommodating even Islamic doctrines that they could not fully accept.
1 Andrew F. March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 3–5; Sayed Khatab and Gary D. Bouma, Democracy in Islam (New York: Routledge, 2007), esp. i, 1–6; Nader A. Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. ix–xiii; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: Norton, 2003), 119–59; Noah Feldman, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Feldman, “The Best Hope,” in Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, by Khaled Abou El Fadl et al., ed. Joshua Cohen and Deborah Chasman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 59; Abdullahi An-Na'im, Islam and Human Rights, ed. Mashood A. Baderim (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); Robert Spencer, ed., The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005); Ahmad S. Moussalli, The Islamic Quest for Democracy, Pluralism, and Human Rights (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 17–18.
2 March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 3–13; Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, 23–31; Nicholas Tampio, Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 158–59, 167–86; John Milbank, “Shari'a and the True Basis of Group Rights: Islam, the West, and Liberalism,” in Shari'a in the West, ed. Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 135–57; Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1–23.
3 Imam Ruhullah Khomeini, “The Necessity of Islamic Government,” in Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates in Islam, ed. Mansoor Moaddel and Kamran Talattof (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 253, 256–57; Sayyid Qutb, “Islam as the Foundation of Knowledge,” in Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates, 198–201; Khatab and Bouma, Democracy in Islam, 78–80; Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” Atlantic, March 2015, 81–83.
4 Khatab and Bouma, Democracy in Islam, 7–11; cf. 204–5.
5 Moussalli, Islamic Quest for Democracy, 158; see also Abou El Fadl, Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, 3–46; Siraj Sait and Hilary Lim, Land, Law and Islam: Property and Human Rights in the Muslim World (New York: Zed Books, 2006).
6 March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 10–11; Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003), 37–38; M. A. Muqtedar Khan, “The Primacy of Political Philosophy,” in Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, 63–68.
7 March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 11–13; Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, esp. 67–102; Mohamed Charfi, Islam and Liberty: The Historical Misunderstanding, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Zed Books, 2005), 38–134; Khatab and Bouma, Democracy in Islam, esp. 12–136, 192–210.
8 George W. Bush, “President Discusses War on Terror at National Endowment for Democracy,” accessed March 6, 2015, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051006-3.html; also March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 259–60.
9 Charfi, Islam and Liberty, 135–65; Hashemi, Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy, 90–102; Hashemi, “Change from Within,” in Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, 52; Erich Kolig, “To Shari'aticize or not to Shari'aticize: Islamic and Secular Law in Liberal Democratic Society,” in Shari'a in the West, ed. Ahdar and Aroney, 275–76; Khatab and Bouma, Democracy in Islam, 210; Moussalli, Islamic Quest for Democracy, esp. 158–67; March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, esp. 65–96; Ilan Berman, Winning the Long War: Retaking the Offensive against Radical Islam (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 11–30; Abdolkarim Soroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam: Essential Writings of Abdolkarim Soroush, trans. and ed. Mahmoud Sadri and Ahmad Sadri (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 140–49; John L. Esposito, “Practice and Theory,” in Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, 96–100; Khan, “Primacy of Political Philosophy”; Feldman, “The Best Hope,” 61; Tampio, Kantian Courage, 21, 176–84; Sait and Lim, Land, Law and Islam.
10 The near exceptions to this rule, Moussalli, Islamic Quest for Democracy and March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, do exemplary work with premodern Islamic jurisprudence and theology, but they hardly address political philosophy proper; on the importance of this distinction see Muhsin Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 37–46. For an extensive overview of the tradition of Islamic political philosophy, see Hans Daiber, “Political Philosophy,” in History of Islamic Philosophy, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 841–85. Orwin, Alexander, “Can Humankind Deliberate on a Global Scale? Alfarabi and the Politics of the Inhabited World,” American Political Science Review 108 (2014): 830–39Google Scholar, shows how Alfarabi's thought can illuminate even certain contemporary political debates that have little to do with Islam proper.
11 Feldman, “The Best Hope,” 61; After Jihad, 233; Crone, Patricia, “Al-Fārābī's Imperfect Constitutions,” Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph 57 (2004): 217Google Scholar; March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 62.
12 Alfarabi uses the terms “science” and “philosophy” more or less interchangeably: see Leo Strauss, “Farabi's Plato,” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, English Section (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), 363–65, 389–90; Miriam Galston, Politics and Excellence: The Political Philosophy of Alfarabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 99n9; Paul L. Heck, “Doubts about the Religious Community (Milla) in al-Fārābī and the Brethren of Purity,” in In the Age of al-Fārābī: Arabic Philosophy in the Fourth/Tenth Century, ed. Peter Adamson (London: Warburg Institute, 2008), 201. Alfarabi would therefore call Aristotle's Politics and Plato's Republic works of “political science,” and I will follow this usage as much as modern English allows. The term “political” (madanī) must, as Gutas shows, be understood in the broad sense familiar from Aristotle's dictum that humans are “political” by nature; I do not see why a political theorist should accept Gutas's claim that “we” who “have read Marx and Gramsci” are incapable of understanding this older usage. Cf. Gutas, Dmitri, “The Meaning of madanī in al-Fārābī's ‘Political’ Philosophy,” Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph 57 (2004): 259–82, esp. 266Google Scholar; for further criticism of Gutas's argument see Genequand, Charles, “Loi morale, loi politique: al-Fārābī et Ibn Bāğğa,” Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph 61 (2008): 499–503Google Scholar.
13 Alfarabi, La Statistique des Sciences / Iḥṣā’ al-ʿulūm, ed. Osman Amine [Uthman Amin], 3rd ed. (Cairo: Anglo-Egyptian Library, 1968), 53–54; Alfarabi, Le recensement des sciences: Texte, traduction critique et commentaire, ed. Amor Cherni (Beirut: Dal Albouraq, 2015), 15, 48n2. All emphasis in quotations from Alfarabi is my own, and all translations from texts cited in other languages are my own.
14 Page citations with no work named refer to the translations in Alfarabi, The Political Writings: Selected Aphorisms and Other Texts, ed. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2004), 76–84, 93–113. Original texts can be found in Alfarabi's Book of Religion and Related Texts, ed. Muhsin Mahdi (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1968), 41–66, and Alfarabi, Iḥṣā’ al-ʿulūm, 124–36. I occasionally mark page numbers with an asterisk to indicate that I have emended Butterworth's translations with reference to these editions.
15 E. I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam: An Introductory Outline (Colchester, UK: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co., 1962), 120.
16 The names fiqh and kalām are immediately recognizable as Islamic in origin.
17 Khatab and Bouma, Democracy in Islam, 14–16; Kraemer, Joel L., “The Jihād of the Falāsifa,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10 (1987): 304Google Scholar; Genequand, “Loi morale,” 494.
18 Alfarabi is most likely referring to theological schools of his day (including the Hanbalites and the Muʿtazilites), while also pointing to common apologetical strategies that are “not restricted to any one historical group, Muslim or other” (Majid Fakhry, Al-Fārābī, Founder of Islamic Neoplatonism: His Life, Works, and Influence [Oxford: Oneworld, 2002], 49–51; Ulrich Rudolph, “Al-Fārābī und die Muʿtazila,” in A Common Rationality: Muʿtazilism in Islam and Judaism, ed. Camilla Adang, Sabine Schmidtke, and David Sklare [Würzburg: Ergon, 2007], 62–66).
19 See Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney, “The Topography of Shari'a in the Western Political Landscape,” in Shari'a in the West, 19.
20 See Galston, Politics and Excellence, 20–21.
21 See Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 90.
22 Genequand, “Loi morale,” 495.
23 See Carlos Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 34.
24 Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 116; Rudolph, “Al-Fārābī und die Muʿtazila,” 62–64; Joshua Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi's “Summary of Plato's ‘Laws’” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 4–5; Cherni, Recensement des sciences, 216n1.
25 Even the term “political science” and its cognates barely appear anywhere else in Alfarabi: see Alfarabi, “Attainment of Happiness,” in Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, ed. Muhsin Mahdi, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 23 (§18), and the four other brief passages cited at Al-Fārābī's Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Ilai Alon (Cambridge: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 2002), 1:128–31.
26 Mahdi and several scholars who follow him have argued that each of these two accounts of political science (ES's and BR's) should be further divided into a “first” and a “second” version of political science, with the division recognizable by a substantive shift within each account from a more Aristotelian to a more Platonic understanding. See Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 83–89, 119–23; Galston, Politics and Excellence, 103–4, 156–57; Butterworth, Political Writings, 73–74, 89–92; Colmo, Christopher, “Alfarabi on the Prudence of Founders,” Review of Politics 60 (1998): 727–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Genequand, “Loi morale,” 498. I agree that the tensions within each account are worth exploring but will concentrate on the contrast between the two accounts, which I see as the more striking. Ultimately, my observations ought to be integrated with these scholars’ into a more complete interpretation of the two texts. Amor Cherni, in his edition of BR (La religion: Texte, traduction critique et commentaire [Beirut: Dar Albouraq, 2012], 74n187), emends the text in order to make the description of “political science” start only at Butterworth's p. 106 rather than p. 101; his reasons include that the parallels to ES do not really begin until p. 106, which he later admits is not true (see La religion, 90n246), as well as that the emendation is needed in order to show what unites the different parts of BR into a whole (ibid.), a concern that I hope to address in what follows.
27 Norbert Campagna, “Philosophe musulman ou musulman philosophe? Le rapport entre philosophie et religion dans la pensée d'Al-Fārābī,” in Glaube und Vernunft in der Philosophie der Neuzeit, ed. Dietmar H. Heidemann and Raoul Weicker (New York: Georg Olms, 2013), 30.
28 Mahdi (introduction to Book of Religion, 11; Alfarabi and the Foundation, 94–98) and Butterworth (Political Writings, 74–75, 89) have both suggested that BR remedies deficiencies in ES's political science and have called for a detailed comparison between the texts that would show this, but neither undertakes that comparison himself. Galston's extensive comparison of other parallel passages in Alfarabi's works for some reason leaves out the single pairing of ES and BR (see Politics and Excellence, 200–220; cf. 200n39). Other in-depth interpretations of BR have discussed no more than its one “most striking” deviation from ES. See Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 96–124, esp. 98, 123; Colmo, “Prudence of Founders,” 719–41; Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as Founder (New York: Lexington Books, 2005), 89–103; Campagna, “Philosophe musulman”; El-Rayes, Waseem, “The Book of Religion's Political and Pedagogical Objectives,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 40 (2013): 175–97Google Scholar.
29 This is one point on which Alfarabi scholars across major divisions in interpretive approach (as sketched below) do show remarkable agreement. Alfarabi is a famously “careful user of language” who neither “omits” nor “employs a word … without a purpose” (Gutas, “Meaning of madanī,” 269; Walker, Paul E., “Platonisms in Islamic Philosophy,” Studia Islamica 79 [1994]: 15Google Scholar; see also Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric, xxvi–xxvii). One study spends two pages unpacking the significance of two words in one of his titles: Ulrich Rudolph, “Reflections on al-Fārābī's Mabādi’ ārā’ ahl al-madina al-fāḍila,” in In the Age of al-Fārābī, ed. Adamson, 2–4; see the similarly detailed analysis at Galston, Politics and Excellence, 200–220. Without addressing this and other literature on Alfarabi's precision as an author, Cherni repeatedly emends away BR's divergences from ES (including nearly all of those listed in Tables 3 and 5 below) on the grounds that these must represent copyists’ errors (see, e.g., al-Milla, 66–67, 94–95). The footnotes to his editions (al-Milla and Recensement des sciences) do nonetheless make it easier to track many of the differences between the two original texts.
30 Again, the terms sunna and sharīʿa (which appeared nowhere in the description of the old political science) are recognizably Islamic. Cherni, Recensement des sciences, 206n3, asserts that ES's reference to the nonhereditary character of “virtuous” kingship may be a copyist's error.
31 Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 95–96; see also Leo Strauss, “Quelques remarques sur la science politique de Maïmonide et de Fârâbî,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013), 4 (cited by original page numbers). Each of Alfarabi's other political writings also discusses this “virtuous” law-based government in some form: see “Selected Aphorisms,” in Political Writings, ed. Butterworth, 37–38 (§58); “The Political Regime,” trans. Charles Butterworth, in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, 2nd ed., ed. Joshua Parens and Joseph C. Macfarland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 42–43 (§§81–82); Al-Fārābī on the Perfect State, ed. and trans. Richard Walzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 248–53. I will suggest later that these other works may be Alfarabi's own examples of such a new “political science” as he sketches in BR.
32 Alfarabi, “Philosophy of Plato,” in Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, 65 (§§31–32); see Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 85; contrast Sankari, Farouk A., “Plato and Alfarabi: A Comparison of Some Aspects of Their Political Philosophies,” Vivarium 8 (1970): 6Google Scholar.
33 The usual view is that Alfarabi interpreted Islam as a “virtuous religion,” subordinate to philosophy but still as true as a religion could be (see, e.g., Walzer, Perfect State, 11–16; Heck, “Doubts about the Religious Community,” 195–213; Campagna, “Philosophe musulman”; Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, esp. 126–28, 165; Daiber, “Political Philosophy,” 849). Some deny that Alfarabi accepted his community's beliefs even in this limited sense: Strauss, “Farabi's Plato,” 371–75; Kraemer, “Jihād of the Falāsifa,” 288–324, esp. 318–19; Colmo, Breaking with Athens, 104–7; Philippe Vallat, “Vrai philosophe et faux prophète selon Farabi: Aspects historiques et théoriques de l'art du symbole,” in Miroir et savoir: La transmission d'un theme platonicien, des Alexandrins à la philosophie arabo-musulmane, ed. Daniel De Smet, Meryem Sebti, and Godefroid de Callataÿ (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), 118–29, cited at Ulrich Rudolph, “Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī,” in Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: Philosophie in der islamischen Welt, vol. 1, 8.–10. Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Rudolph (Basel: Schwabe, 2012), 443. Others argue on the contrary that his Islamic beliefs even prevented him from accepting certain doctrines of Hellenic philosophy: Sweeney, Michael J., “Philosophy and Jihād: Al-Fārābī on Compulsion to Happiness,” Review of Metaphysics 60 (2007): 543–72Google Scholar; Hans Daiber, The Ruler as Philosopher: A New Interpretation of al-Fārābī's View (New York: North-Holland, 1986), esp. 17–18.
34 Alfarabi, “Philosophy of Plato,” 65–67 (§§31, 38, 34); on the Letters see Strauss, “Quelques remarques,” 4.
35 Alfarabi, “Philosophy of Plato,” 63–64, 66–67 (§§30, 36); cf. Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions, 157–60; Sankari, “Plato and Alfarabi,” 5–6.
36 Alfarabi, “Philosophy of Plato,” 67 (§38); cf. 64 (§30).
37 Strauss, “Farabi's Plato,” 382–84.
38 Colmo, Christopher, “Theory and Practice: Alfarabi's Plato Revisited,” American Political Science Review 86 (1992): 974Google Scholar; Kraemer, “Jihād of the Falāsifa,” 319–20.
39 Alfarabi, “Plato's Laws,” trans. Muhsin Mahdi, in Medieval Political Philosophy, ed. Parens and Macfarland, 72–73.
40 March, Andrew, “Taking People as They Are: Islam as a ‘Realistic Utopia’ in the Political Theory of Sayyid Qutb,” American Political Science Review 104 (2010): 202–5Google Scholar; Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 17–18; Strauss, “Quelques remarques,” 2. Some scholars question whether “the other life” in which Alfarabi says this true happiness is enjoyed is a literal afterlife or simply the “other life” enjoyed by philosophers in this world: Rosenthal, Political Thought, 271n29; Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 83–84, 88.
41 Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 167–68, 102; see also Galston, Politics and Excellence, 21.
42 On this significance of the verb ʿarrafa see Butterworth, Political Writings, 78n4, 96n8.
43 See Crone, “Imperfect Constitutions,” 196. .
44 See ibid., 203. Given the sharp distinction drawn at first between the “virtuous” (fāḍil) and “ignorant,” Cherni argues that the term “most virtuous” (afḍal) when applied here to “ignorant” rulers must be translated “best,” meaning “least vicious,” rather than “most virtuous” (al-Milla, 34n35). I am not sure that I understand this distinction but believe that it fits my interpretation.
45 Contrast Colmo, Breaking with Athens, 93, and Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 102.
46 Crone, “Imperfect Constitutions,” 196–97; also Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 101–2. The “ignorant” (jāhilī) rulership that ES's pre-Islamic political science saw as the only alternative to “virtuous” rulership was designated by the traditional Islamic term for pre-Islamic pagans (Crone, “Imperfect Constitutions,” 195, 198; Rosenthal, Political Thought, 135).
47 Alfarabi compares a “virtuous” community to a body whose organs all cooperate harmoniously to achieve a single end; he compares this civic harmony to cosmic harmony; he calls that cosmic harmony “just”; and he calls such civic harmony necessary for the success of any human association (104; 112; 94; 102). For the Platonic sources of these metaphors, see Sankari, “Plato and Alfarabi,” 3.
48 Galston, Politics and Excellence, 89–90, goes too far in saying that this doctrine is already “dropped” or tacitly retracted in what she (following Mahdi) calls ES's “second” account of political science: at no point in ES is it explicitly contradicted, as it is in BR.
49 See Strauss, “Quelques remarques,” 28; March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, 103–13.
50 See Alfarabi, “Attainment of Happiness,” 49–50 (§§62–63).
51 See also Genequand, “Loi morale,” 506.
52 That these “inclinations” are unchangeable is indicated when ES later lists the same five moral-political phenomena, again with “inclinations” omitted, as the things that a ruler “establishes” among his citizens: natural “inclinations” cannot be altered even by a ruler powerful enough to alter his citizens’ “moral habits” and “states of character” (77; cf. 76).
53 See also Alfarabi, “Selected Aphorisms,” 32 (§42); Rosenthal, Political Thought, 121; Heck, “Doubts about the Religious Community,” esp. 199; Strauss, “Farabi's Plato,” 371–72. Cherni emends the text in order to eliminate the apparent contradiction (al-Milla, 114n342; cf. 46n70).
54 See Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 98, 121–23; Colmo, Breaking with Athens, 98–99.
55 Butterworth, Political Writings, 107n19, 78n4; Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 121–22.
56 Compare Alfarabi, Iḥṣā’ al-ʿulūm, 122–23; contrast Cherni, Recensement des sciences, 17.
57 See Galston, Politics and Excellence, 144; contrast Gutas, “Meaning of madanī,” 259.
58 Although most of the literature takes the Neoplatonic views articulated in Alfarabi's major metaphysical-political treatises to be his own, some have attacked this assumption: see Galston, Miriam, “A Re-examination of al-Fārābī's Neoplatonism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (1977): 13–32Google Scholar; Politics and Excellence, 214–15; Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 6–9, 59–60; Colmo, Breaking with Athens, 97–99. Others have responded in defense of it: Philippe Vallat, Farabi et l’École d'Alexandrie: Des prémisses de la connaissance à la philosophie politique (Paris: Vrin., 2004), 85–128; Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions, esp. 32–35; Rudolph, “Reflections,” 1–4; Rudolph, “Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī,” 431–34; Damien Janos, Method, Structure, and Development in al-Fārābī's Cosmology (Leiden: Brill, 2012), esp. 40–41, 92n203, 312–15; Genequand “Loi morale,” 496.
59 See, e.g., Qutb, “Islam as the Foundation of Knowledge,” 199–201; Sayyid Abul Aʿla Maududi, “Fallacy of Rationalism,” in Modernist and Fundamentalist Debates, ed. Moaddel and Talattof, 216–19.
60 See Rudolph, “Reflections,” 9–11; Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions, 197–98; Cherni, al-Milla, 40n54.
61 Averroës, Decisive Treatise and Epistle Dedicatory, trans. Charles Butterworth (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2001), 8–9. Alfarabi's own writings aim to have this very effect on his community (Fakhry, Al-Fārābī, 128–29; Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions, 162–63).
62 Walzer, Perfect State, 7–8, 5–6; Genequand “Loi morale,” 496; Rudolph, “Reflections,” 4; Fraenkel, Philosophical Religions, 162–63.
63 Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation, 4, 6–10, 58–60, 123–24; introduction to Book of Religion, 11–13. Galston, Politics and Excellence, 213–20, offers an alternative interpretation of the relation between Alfarabi's parallel political works that is criticized in a review by Druart, Therèse-Anne, Review of Politics 54 (1992): 329–30Google Scholar, as well as in Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric, 24–27. Rosenthal offers another (Political Thought, 141–42), as does Crone (“Imperfect Constitutions,” 191–228). Crone's is the most comprehensive, but in the case of ES and BR she relies on what she admits are unsupported conjectures about the order in which Alfarabi composed them (ibid., 217).
64 Galston, Politics and Excellence, 96–97; cf. Cherni, al-Milla, 68n172.
65 See Heck, “Doubts about the Religious Community,” 198; Strauss, “Farabi's Plato's,” 384.
66 See Galston, Politics and Excellence, 134n61.
67 See Alfarabi, “Attainment of Happiness,” 50 (§63). Translation emended with reference to Alfarabi, Kitāb taḥṣīl al-saʿāda [Book of the attainment of happiness], ed. Jaʿfar al-Yasīn (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1981).
68 See March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship, esp. 15, 23–64, 272.
69 Tampio raises this question with force and clarity (Kantian Courage, 102, 168–69, 183), but his answers to it are short on specifics: cf. ibid., 176–86; see also my review in Review of Politics 75 (2013): 695–96Google Scholar. Compare also the review by Taylor, Robert S., Perspectives on Politics 11 (2013): 632Google Scholar, whose praise of Tampio restores the more usual liberal approach that Tampio had tried to break with. Mark Lilla raises the question even more boldly and without claiming to answer it: “The next Nobel Peace Prize … should go to the thinker or leader who develops a model of constitutional theocracy giving Muslim countries a coherent way of recognizing yet limiting the authority of religious law and making it compatible with good governance. This would be a historic, though not necessarily [liberal-] democratic, achievement” (“Our Illegible Age,” New Republic, June 30, 2014, 47). Saba Mahmood, “Is Liberalism Islam's Only Answer?,” in Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, ed. Abou El Fadl, 74–77, offers an Islamic complaint about the inflexibility of liberal theorists who insist that Islam accommodate liberalism rather than vice versa.
